Artifact 2 Analysis
Context:
I designed a review activity as an alternative way to review instead of just telling them what is on the quiz and having them ask me questions about it. In the review activity, students rotated from station to station and did different activities to help them to review (to see samples of student work, click here). Afterwards, I gave all of the students a survey and then I analyzed the results of the quizzes to determine whether or not this review activity helped them to retain the content material.
Analysis of Artifact/Relation to Focus of Inquiry:
This review activity seemed to help the students retain the content material; one of the survey questions supported this--student one said that she did not feel like she had to study at all for the quiz after the review activity, and the average quiz score for the class after this review activity as an 86.03%, which is high even for this class.These positive results may have been due to the nature of the review activity itself. Halpern & Hakel (2003) found that when students are asked to present material in a manner that is different from how they learned it, then they are more likely to retain it. Students had learned most of the material beforehand in the form of lectures and worksheets that had them apply the information, but many of the stations in the review activity had them demonstrate their knowledge of the material in a way that they had not done before. For example, at one station I had students act out what happens to an electron when light strikes it instead of having them just fill in the blanks with vocabulary or watch a video of it, as before.
Furthermore, this review activity may also have been so successful because it involved so many of the multiple intelligences. Gardner (1983) argued that every person has a set of intelligence that they are inclined towards, and thus, applications of these intelligences are also the manners in which they learn the best. In this review activity, there were so many intelligences involved--linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and interpersonal; the linguistic intelligence was involved as students were writing down their answers and talking to each other about them, the logical/mathematical intelligence was involved as they were solving chemistry problems and applying logic, the visual-spatial intelligence was involved as in some stations, they were drawing out the electrons in their orbitals, the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence was involved in station one where they had to act out what happens to an electron when it gets excited, and the interpersonal intelligence was involved as the students were working in groups the entire time (see the chart in the Methods section for a further breakdown of which types of activities suit different intelligences)
Thus, because there were so many intelligence involved, students may have felt that they were learning in the manner that suited them best. In other words, this supports that the more intelligences that are involved in activity, the more engaged the students will be, and thus the more likely they will be to retain the content material. Furthermore, because this was also a team activity, there were different combinations of people who were strong/weak at certain intelligences and so the rest of the team "picked up for the slack" if there were some people that did not learn well in that particular manner.
However, even though there did seem to be an overwhelmingly positive response to this activity, there were also some student who did not like it so much. Student 2, for example, said that "I thought the review station is a good idea but it didn't help me personally because since we was rushing on time management I couldn't take the time and see what I didn't know." There was some push-back to the activity from some students, which I think may have been due to the fact that the activity was unfamiliar to them--students, like the rest of us, are creatures of habit, and they may be less likely to learn from an activity if they are unfamiliar with it and have not tried it before. therefore, next time I try an activity like this, I would want to introduce it early in the year so that students get time to get used to it so that when I do use it as a review activity, they can get more out of it.
However, though this data seems to support that the review activity did increase the retention of content material, there is no way to prove that the review activity led to high quiz scores, because students might also have studied really hard, or they may already have known the material beforehand. Therefore, next time I do this activity, I would give them a pre-review quiz and a post-review quiz to determine the effectiveness of the review activity itself.
Furthermore, as this data seemed to support that including multiple intelligences in an activity positively affects content material retention, I want to try to include more of the intelligences in my regular instruction so that by the time the review comes around, students will have learned the information in as many manners as possible which might help them to retain the material better.
I designed a review activity as an alternative way to review instead of just telling them what is on the quiz and having them ask me questions about it. In the review activity, students rotated from station to station and did different activities to help them to review (to see samples of student work, click here). Afterwards, I gave all of the students a survey and then I analyzed the results of the quizzes to determine whether or not this review activity helped them to retain the content material.
Analysis of Artifact/Relation to Focus of Inquiry:
This review activity seemed to help the students retain the content material; one of the survey questions supported this--student one said that she did not feel like she had to study at all for the quiz after the review activity, and the average quiz score for the class after this review activity as an 86.03%, which is high even for this class.These positive results may have been due to the nature of the review activity itself. Halpern & Hakel (2003) found that when students are asked to present material in a manner that is different from how they learned it, then they are more likely to retain it. Students had learned most of the material beforehand in the form of lectures and worksheets that had them apply the information, but many of the stations in the review activity had them demonstrate their knowledge of the material in a way that they had not done before. For example, at one station I had students act out what happens to an electron when light strikes it instead of having them just fill in the blanks with vocabulary or watch a video of it, as before.
Furthermore, this review activity may also have been so successful because it involved so many of the multiple intelligences. Gardner (1983) argued that every person has a set of intelligence that they are inclined towards, and thus, applications of these intelligences are also the manners in which they learn the best. In this review activity, there were so many intelligences involved--linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and interpersonal; the linguistic intelligence was involved as students were writing down their answers and talking to each other about them, the logical/mathematical intelligence was involved as they were solving chemistry problems and applying logic, the visual-spatial intelligence was involved as in some stations, they were drawing out the electrons in their orbitals, the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence was involved in station one where they had to act out what happens to an electron when it gets excited, and the interpersonal intelligence was involved as the students were working in groups the entire time (see the chart in the Methods section for a further breakdown of which types of activities suit different intelligences)
Thus, because there were so many intelligence involved, students may have felt that they were learning in the manner that suited them best. In other words, this supports that the more intelligences that are involved in activity, the more engaged the students will be, and thus the more likely they will be to retain the content material. Furthermore, because this was also a team activity, there were different combinations of people who were strong/weak at certain intelligences and so the rest of the team "picked up for the slack" if there were some people that did not learn well in that particular manner.
However, even though there did seem to be an overwhelmingly positive response to this activity, there were also some student who did not like it so much. Student 2, for example, said that "I thought the review station is a good idea but it didn't help me personally because since we was rushing on time management I couldn't take the time and see what I didn't know." There was some push-back to the activity from some students, which I think may have been due to the fact that the activity was unfamiliar to them--students, like the rest of us, are creatures of habit, and they may be less likely to learn from an activity if they are unfamiliar with it and have not tried it before. therefore, next time I try an activity like this, I would want to introduce it early in the year so that students get time to get used to it so that when I do use it as a review activity, they can get more out of it.
However, though this data seems to support that the review activity did increase the retention of content material, there is no way to prove that the review activity led to high quiz scores, because students might also have studied really hard, or they may already have known the material beforehand. Therefore, next time I do this activity, I would give them a pre-review quiz and a post-review quiz to determine the effectiveness of the review activity itself.
Furthermore, as this data seemed to support that including multiple intelligences in an activity positively affects content material retention, I want to try to include more of the intelligences in my regular instruction so that by the time the review comes around, students will have learned the information in as many manners as possible which might help them to retain the material better.